EdTech Tips for Teaching Continuity

Tips on mitigating instructor (and teaching team) absence:

1. Proactively provide access to your Quercus course: You can add a colleague (or anyone in the UofT community) to your Quercus course (temporarily). 
2. Share recordings from a previous term to your teaching team and/or your teaching substitute. If you have recordings from a previous term, consider sharing the videos so that your designate can review the content you typically cover.
3. If you are using Zoom, share any meeting information across the entire teaching team, so that anyone can jump into a session as needed. You might also consider making someone an alternative host. 
4. Take advantage of in-class support via LSM and the Tech2U program. You can make a request for support through the LSM Instructor Portal or send an email to avrequest@utoronto.ca. LSM staff or student ambassadors can be helpful in your classrooms for set up and other technical needs.
5. Set up a "Zoom Room." If you are not able to attend class, but are up for teaching, you might set up a one-off Zoom (or other webinar tool) session wherein someone physically in the classroom shares the session over the projector; you are remote but your students are in the classroom, as scheduled. (See #4 for technical support ideas.) While we don't recommend this modality for an entire semester, it would work in a pinch.
6. Film your labs. Not only would these recordings be helpful this year, you can reuse them from term to term. See our recommendations on how to film in labs.

Tips on mitigating student absence:

1. Post an announcement with course and administrative updates so that information is captured both in class and online. By sharing it in more than one modality, it's more likely the whole class will have access to the information.
2. Record and share video recordings of your in-person teaching activity (see recording your in-person teaching options). While we encourage sharing to the whole class, you can also choose to share content to specific students using OneDrive. If you aren't recording this year, perhaps you can share videos from a previous term.
3. Offer online office hours for those who cannot physically attend a class session. 
4. Consider an online version of your low stakes asessments (using Quercus Quizzes, Assignments or Crowdmark). While not mandatory, this can allow certain students to participate remotely and in a timely fashion.
5. Build in some flexible assessments/activities (adding activities that do not require in-person interaction to complete, like an asynchronous discussion or a formative online quiz). This not only supports absent students, it provides an alternate mechanism for participation for all of your students.